By Norma Fay Green –

In early August 2005 I was in San Antonio, Texas for my annual professional conference of journalism educators and decided to try to find Sandra Cisneros’ famous purple house that generated international news coverage more than 10 years ago.

When the author of The House on Mango Street left Chicago for Texas, she settled in the King William area of San Antonio, a historic district that was farmland of Mission San Antonio de Valero, aka the Alamo, until the late 1700s. Later the land was subdivided into 25 blocks and by the mid-1800s became an enclave of German immigrants.  The district was originally named King Wilhelm after the 19th century King of Prussia and later anglicized. The area waxed and waned but by the 1950s, people began to restore the houses.  In 1967 it became the first Historic Neighborhood District in Texas.

I had been to San Antonio several years ago and remembered the city as being fairly compact with the district just south of downtown. I figured her house wouldn’t be difficult to locate even though I didn’t have her address or a photo of her house.

I started with the hotel concierge.  A young woman on duty knew nothing about it but got excited at the prospects of such a famous author as Cisneros living in her hometown.  She gave me a city map and marked trolley routes to the historic district. She asked me to tell her where the house was when I found it.

On the fourth day of my intensive conference, I found 90 minutes of free time between sessions and walked outside for only the second time since my arrival. It was a sunny, hot and humid Friday morning with rising temperatures already in the high 90s. I set out for the official Visitor Information Center, two blocks from my hotel.  At the corner of Commerce and Alamo (which pretty much sums up the tourism perspective), I encountered a safari-clad Official Visitor Greeter with a big button that said so.

I asked if he knew where Cisneros’ purple house was.  He didn’t but, ever helpful, he pulled out his walkie-talkie and asked someone back at headquarters.  Through a crackly connection, the woman at the other end said it was on Guenther Street but didn’t know a cross street or an address.  Roger and out, I was getting closer to my quest.

The OVG waved goodbye and pointed me to the Blue Line trolley stop across the street that would take me to the historic district.  In the time it took a staggering homeless man to curl up on the shady bench behind me, the trolley appeared.  I was the only passenger on the mid-morning open-air vehicle that was actually green and following an invisible blue route to a real purple house.

I asked the driver if he knew where the infamous residence was.  He said he tried to find it once but ran across several purple houses and wasn’t sure which one was hers.  He said that the historic district allowed residents to gut the inside of their houses but they were to preserve the exterior within strict guidelines.  He went on to say that Cisneros lived on “the other side of the district where a lot of Hispanics like to use bright colors.”

Twenty years ago I walked around the King William Historic District with my father and did not recall seeing any richly hued houses. Articles published at the time of her purple house painting in 1997 quoted her as contending that purple, or more precisely periwinkle with turquoise trim were historic, pre-Columbian ancestral colors, whether the San Antonio Historic Design and Review Board and the neighborhood association saw it that way or not. Eventually she won the argument for historic inclusion and I wanted to see the victorious edifice.

The driver thought I should get off at Guenther and walk over to the Steves Homestead Museum, a mansion in the heart of the district along the east bank of the San Antonio River, and ask in the Visitors Center there.  So I got off the trolley at Alamo and Guenther and walked the two blocks to the museum house past manicured lawns and hissing sprinklers.  I stopped to admire a profusion of bright purple flowers wrapped around a corner garden gate.

At the Steves Visitor Center, an older woman was sitting behind the counter with her back to me.  When I opened the screen door, she sprang into action ready to take my money for a guided tour that had just begun.  I asked if she had a book about the historic district.  She said she didn’t but instead offered a free map with a self-guided walking tour.  “Perfect,” I said and then asked, “By the way, do you know where the Sandra Cisneros purple house is?”  In a multipurpose moment, she offered me a slight smile coupled with a look of disappointment and then an audible sigh as she pulled out a ballpoint pen and drew an extension of Guenther street beyond the perimeters of the map she had just handed me.  “She doesn’t live in THIS area,” she said.  “It’s quite far to walk without a car.”  I thanked her and thought, I’m a big city gal wearing comfortable sandals and sunscreen.  Plus I was on a mission.

It was already 11 a.m. when I crossed Alamo and I had to be back at the conference in 45 minutes.  I retraced my steps to Alamo and Guenther and headed over to the fork in the road that the Steves Visitor Center woman had described.  I noticed a new row of townhouses freshly painted in white and beige followed by smaller, older single family houses in various pastel colors—mostly yellow, beige, green and gray.  The sidewalk on this side of Guenther varied from new paving to slightly cracked, terribly broken, dangerously uprooted and even nonexistent in front of some homes.  I crossed to the shady side of the street and continued walking—trying to avoid the uneven pavement below and still watch for the purple house I was sure to encounter on the horizon.

Halfway down the block, I came across two women standing and chatting at the parkway.  One with dark hair had a cup of coffee in her hand while a blonde haired woman was putting something in a car trunk. Map in hand, I stopped and said, “Excuse me, I’m trying to find Sandra Cisneros’ purple house, do you know where it is?”  They both smiled and the dark-haired woman took my arm and pointed, “it’s right around the corner.”  The blonde haired woman said, “Yes, it’s right over there—but it’s not purple anymore!”

We all laughed. “What color is it?” I asked.  The blonde woman said, “Kind of a coral.  You can’t miss it though because it’s on a corner and is landscaped with lots of agave plants.  Take the scenic route down Constance and then over.”
I thanked them and continued walking on the shady side of the quiet street.

As I turned left and encountered a couple of gardeners trimming hedges, I heard a train whistle in the distance and closer at hand, a quacking duck in someone’s backyard.

Around the corner I found what I thought must be Cisneros’ formerly purple house.  Coral it was not—at least by my definition.  I would call it an embarrassed salmon or something more carnal.  It was a deeper red than I had expected. Maybe it’s what happens when you paint over purple. Her gabled red cottage had yellow trim on the window frames and front porch.  The front door was a bright green.  Some of the various plantings surrounding her corner lot were blooming with pink, purple, orange, yellow and blue flowers. I took several photographs of her colorful homestead from various angles and then walked to the end of the street just to be sure I had missed no other architectural gems in jewel tones.

On my way back to the trolley stop, I encountered a postal carrier and asked the mailman in his regulation blue-gray Bermuda shorts if the red house was indeed where Cisneros lived.  He nodded, smiled and said “When it was purple, there used to be a lot of tour buses coming through here but not so much anymore.”

I thanked him and rushed to the Blue Line trolley stop.  Soon the green trolley came and I was unable to produce my yellow roundtrip ticket, lost somewhere in the bowels of my travel bag.  But I had the same driver and so I told him I found the famous purple house lurking under a red one.  He laughed and said that was good enough for a free ride back to my hotel.

Dr. Green is a tenured faculty member in the journalism department at Columbia College Chicago.